Document retrieval systems, such as search engines, have been the subject of considerable research and development. The sophistication of speech recognition systems has also significantly advanced. One of the difficulties facing document retrieval systems is providing a process which limits or obviates the retrieval of irrelevant documents in response to a user's query. This problem however proves even more difficult if it is desired to provide a speech recognition based interface for retrieval of documents. Speech recognition systems have previously been used for limited retrieval applications involving a very structured and limited data set for information retrieval. It is desired to provide a useful alternative to existing information retrieval systems and the steps they execute.